Managing Meetings: Staying on Track

Last week we talked about managing the meeting itself in terms of what information to share with attendees at the start of the meeting, during the meeting, and afterwards. Those tips were focused on keeping everyone in the know to have a smooth meeting.

This week we're going to offer some ideas for managing problems that can come up during meetings in a web environment. We'll be linking tips we've already shared to address:

• How to manage time (and people) during the meeting
• How to deal with inadvertently disruptive attendees

 

Time Management: A Story

Harry had planned his staff meeting with eight attendees very carefully. He would share information at the start and then some brainstorming on an initiative he'd already explained to his staff via email. Everything was off to a great start since he had sent his staff the agenda ahead of time and they all had a shared document for their brainstorming.

Enter Hermione. Hermione was a fantastic employee. Hermione also liked to talk. A lot. And when she started to talk, she could derail the entire group's focus.

Even in meetings where all attendees were asked to mute, Hermione would take to the chat and offer her thoughts, often very off topic. Harry had gotten used to keeping an eye on chat and steering the group back by acknowledging their chat discussion. That was often all it took. Sometimes he'd have to acknowledge it with "I see a lot going on in chat. Can someone tell me if I missed something on our topic?" That usually did the trick.

This time, Henry had a plan for the discussion portion of the meeting. He was ready.

"Let's take a look now at our brainstorming for the Making Magic Matter Initiative. I asked all eight of you to come to the meeting with some ideas, so let's go around alphabetically and each toss out one idea we've come up with, taking turns. To move this along, let's take one minute per turn! Albus, you get us started!"

Everyone took turns offering ideas. When it was Hermione's turn, as she began to get long-winded and a bit off topic, Harry sent her a private instant message to wrap up her one minute turn. Everyone was able to share good ideas and no one voice controlled the entire meeting.

Harry thought back to when he first started leading meetings. Sometimes he would talk the entire time even when he wanted some staff feedback because it just felt too awkward to allow for silence while staff gathered their thoughts. He learned it worked well to keep things flowing by setting a time limit for himself on how long he'd talk. The same was true when he had multiple presenters in a meeting: he let everyone know ahead of time how long they had to present their information and had someone else send a private message alert letting them when they had only 2 minutes remaining.

Setting a time limit and giving a wrap up signal even ended up working on this smaller scale meeting with the talkative Hermione.

 

The Inadvertently Disruptive Attendee

Remember Darth Pug loud breather? In our Audio Best Practices, we talked about how all attendees should check that they're muted if they have background noise in their environment or if the meeting requires it.

But humans are humans and may forget to mute, not realize what a loud breather they are, be immune to the sounds they're accustomed to in their environment, or think they've muted when they haven't. And if an attendee is actually paying rapt attention to the meeting content, they may not notice that their mic doesn't have that slash through it indicating "muted."

This is where those Meeting Roles come to the rescue, especially in large meetings. In Harry's meeting above, it would be no big deal to tell Ron everyone could hear his owl, so please mute, with a private message. But in large meetings where multiple people might be causing audio disruptions, that can take precious time away from the content if the meeting presenter or owner has to handle every occurrence of owls, dogs, and breathing.

Instead, decide ahead of time who should mute or alert loud attendees behind the scenes, through private chat. Also don't rely on attendees to keep each other in check; they are trying to pay attention to meeting content. The Technology Facilitator role is a good pick to manage such audio disruptions.

 

Another accidental disruption are attendees with technology issues. Again, the Technology Facilitator is probably the best person to handle those so that the owner/presenters can stay on track.

If it is one of multiple presenters in a large meeting who has a technology issue, again let the Technology Facilitator handle that and just move on to the next presenter whenever possible.

 

Next up: Expect a recap next week as we head into a long holiday weekend!

Let us know what has worked for you with time and people management in a meeting in our Yammer discussion!

 

Anne, Lisa, Amber, and Erin

Remote Experience Working Group